Newspaper editor tortured to death in Ukraine

Sergey Dolgov, the Chief Editor of two newspapers from Mariupol, was arrested on 18 June and has been reported tortured to death on Sunday.

Sergey Dolgov was the Chief Editor of the regular ad-supported newspaper “The Herald of Priazovye” and the historical weekly publication “I want to the USSR”. On June 18, people wearing civil clothes but armed with machine guns broke into the newspapers office, destroyed all that was there, beat up Sergey Dolgov brutally (what with the old age and weak heart condition) and took him away.

It became known today that he was kept in the quarters of the Ukrainian “Dnepr-1” battalion financed by the oligarch Kolomoyskyi and submitted to torture. Finally, the journalist has died under the torture and the soldiers dumped his body in one of the park zones in Dnepropetrovsk.

Journalists are outraged by this event. The Ukrainian government has officially announced earlier that Sergey Dolgov was taken by the Security Service of Ukraine for questioning and therefore nobody expected him to be killed. A journalist could be beaten up, maybe maimed even. The bands killed journalists sometimes but not government controlled services. All that has changed now.

People are killed without a trial by the state now, including journalists who were considered “untouchable” in all conflicts before. And here there could have been no “accidental death” because there are no accidents in the dungeons. Colleagues of Sergey Dolgov are questioning whether any journalist can now walk the streets of Ukraine without fearing for his life…